Pale

FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT PALE - PAGE 2

News item: Kathie Lee Gifford's last appearance on "Live with Regis and Kathie Lee" will be on Friday. Dear Diary: Well, this is it! My final few days on the show! Then it's on to a new career: singing and acting! Hope there's nothing wrong with Reege, though. Today I said to him: "Well, I suppose I could stay. I mean, if you really want me to stay, I'll stay." He got so pale! Then the poor thing had to lie down. Gelman reacted the same way. Hope they're both OK. They'll always mean the world to me. Dear Diary: You know what makes me so sad?

On nights when nothing is stirring, when the trees hang heavy with humidity, I seek solace in ice-cold watermelon.For some reason, when watermelon juices are running down my chin I forget about the sweat trickling down my back. The riper and colder the melon, the more pleasure it offers.The other night, a steamer, I found myself slicing a chunk of reasonably cold, relatively ripe melon for my 12-year-old son and telling him watermelon stories. Both he and his younger brother are fond of the fruit, and watching either of them eat it is always a welcome sight.

RICHMOND, Va. -- Oliver North seems to view politics as a holy war. His opponents are not just people who disagree with him but people beyond the pale -- the "Washington insiders" and "the professional politicians" and "the Washington crowd."His message, he says, is the essence of simplicity: "This is our government, they stole it, and we're coming to take it back."He is all defiance. "I've got news for them," he says of his enemies, real or imagined. "They will never see Ollie North crawling up the steps of Capitol Hill to kiss their big fat -- rings."

Certainly there have been worse transactions in the history of sports. Take your pick: The Red Sox selling Babe Ruth so they could finance a Broadway musical. The Baltimore Colts forcibly dumping pouty Sanford rookie QB John Elway for Mark Hermann and a couple of offensive linemen. The Dodgers trading promising Pedro Martinez for second baseman Delino DeShields. But somewhere down the line, in the zip-zip world of stock car racing, comes this one: Dale Earnhardt Jr. for Kyle Busch.

"Moonlight and Valentino" -- it sounds like a dreamy romance, but be assured, it isn't. A drama? Well, it tries. A comedy? Occasionally. The commercials try to sell it as a romantic comedy, but mostly, "Moonlight and Valentino" features good actresses trying their best to lend some realistic emotion to a contrived drama.Elizabeth Perkins stars as a poetry professor who is suddenly widowed when her husband is struck by a car while he's jogging. Her acting is moving as she is overcome by grief, but it's not moving enough.

THE ALBATROSS known as the space station has scraped through another cycle of congressional skepticism, but only because of Washington's aversion to killing even misbegotten high-tech ventures. Congress is on the way to pruning the budget for the project, but the main effect is to render the space station anemic while it remains extremely expensive.The misfortune is that the costs of even a spartan space station hobble NASA's ability to pursue more promising ventures. In the grand tradition of elastic space accountancy, estimates of the ultimate price range from $7 billion to $37 billion.

By Elsbeth L. Bothe and By Elsbeth L. Bothe,Special to the Sun | October 21, 2001

Pale Horse Coming, by Stephen Hunter. Simon & Schuster. 491 pages. $25. Fallout from the terrible reality of Sept. 11 could thankfully turn away tastes for shoot-'em-up torture thrillers of the sort produced by Stephen Hunter, poet laureate of the NRA. Who now needs fiction featuring outsized terrorists gleefully wreaking carnage upon mythical objects of hate? Bad as bigotry may have been back then, Pale Horse Coming, set in the deep South of 1951, presents historic fictions that will tweak the most credulous believers.

THIS IS A plea to Democrats. Many are planning to leave the country. Others are threatening to open veins. A few talk of forming survival groups and fleeing to the woods. Most, however, simply sit around weeping.To these Democrats I say, pull yourselves together. The recent Republican victory is not the worst blow to civilization since Attila the Hun popularized sacking and pillage. Not at all.The unterrifying fact is that Republicans are no more inhuman than my Uncle Jack, of whom Aunt Pat used to say, "Jack's not tough, he just needs a shave."

WASHINGTON -- It's been a year since the campaign-finance scandal broke. Since then, everything's changed.There has been a cascade of news disclosures, each more damaging than the last, showing fund-raising excesses within the Democratic National Committee and a river of money flowing through congressional politics. There have been ominous reports of Asian money. There has been the bald statement, made by the chairman of the Senate committee examining campaign finance, that the Chinese government had a plan to affect the outcome of the American elections.